Optimal Design and Analysis of a Deformable Mechanism for a Redundantly Driven Variable Swept Wing

Variable swept wing is one important type of morphing aircrafts for adaptation between high and low speed flight. In this paper, a deformable mechanism is presented for hypersonic variable-swept-wing aircraft by means of redundant actuation. A design and optimization method is proposed to devise this mechanism through two steps. In the first step, a multi-objective optimization method is presented to optimize the link lengths of a peripheral slider-rocker mechanism driven by a slider actuator. Three factors are considered: transmission angle, overall linkage size and mechanical efficiency. The proposed optimization method is implemented by combining NSGA-Ⅱ algorithm with the MATLAB optimization tool. In the second step, extra slider-rocker mechanisms are added inside the peripheral mechanism to form a multiple active chain mechanism to redundantly drive the same leading edge for force sharing. A force analysis method is proposed to determine the distributed actuator forces using a method for structurally indeterminate systems. The proposed two-step method is implemented on case studies of two and three redundant chains. The accuracy of the theoretical results are verified to be higher than 90% by commercial software ADAMS simulation during the deformation stabilization. The agreement between the two results manifests that the proposed method is effective, and that redundant chains can indeed distribute the actuation forces for compact space design. A prototype is fabricated to verify the feasibility of the design.